EMICS AND ETICS: The Insider/Outsider Debate

Edited by Thomas N. Headland, Kenneth L. Pike, and Marvin Harris

Published in 1990. Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications, Inc.

Chapter 1. INTRODUCTION

A DIALOGUE BETWEEN KENNETH PIKE AND MARVIN HARRIS ON EMICS AND ETICS

Thomas N. Headland

This essay originally appeared as chapter 1 in the book Emics and Etics: The Insider/Outsider Debate, edited by Thomas Headland, Kenneth Pike, and Marvin Harris (published in 1990 by Sage Publications). It reviews the history and development of the emic/etic concept, the differences in conceptualization of the concept between Pike and Harris, and how the debate between them came about in 1988.

In November 1988 the Program Committee of the American Anthropological Association and the General Anthropology Division, also a part of the AAA, joined together to sponsor an Invited Session at the Association's 87th Annual Meeting on the subject of the history and significance of emics and etics. The hundreds of professional scientists in the audience who sat through that four-hour discussion bear witness to my conjecture that this meeting of two great scholars--Kenneth Pike and Marvin Harris--may go down as one of the significant events of the decade in American anthropology. I introduced the topic and speakers to the audience by reading an earlier version of this present chapter. Five other scholars participated as discussants with Pike and Harris on this panel. These were Dell Hymes, James Lett, Gerald Murray, Nira Reiss, and Roger Keesing. All of them except Keesing revised their papers into chapters for this volume. Subsequent to the Meeting, three other scholars accepted invitations to write papers for the volume: John Berry, Robert Feleppa, and Willard Quine. Their chapters are included herein.

How did this meeting come about? More importantly, how did the terms emic and etic come about, what do they mean today, and why have they become so popular?

My academic career has been heavily influenced by both Kenneth Pike and Marvin Harris. I first studied with Pike in 1958 at the University of Oklahoma, and my wife and I wrote our first two articles under his tutelage at a linguistic workshop he conducted in the Philippines in 1963 (J. Headland 1966; Headland and Wolfenden 1968). My acquaintance with Harris came somewhat later, in the middle 1970s, when Bion Griffin, an anthropologist at the University of Hawaii who was trying to lure me from ethnosemantics to cultural materialism, sent me a photocopy of a chapter out of Harris's 1968 book. That chapter was titled "Emics, Etics, and the New Ethnography." Since then, I have read a good bit of Harris's writings; and his ideas, perhaps even more than Pike's, have had a keen influence in the directions of my own research. I never actually studied under Harris, however, and indeed I met him for the first time only in 1987.

Both Harris and Pike are famous worldwide as leading theoreticians, Harris in anthropology and Pike in linguistics. Both men are philosophers, and each has written about 250 articles and 25 books. Both men are founders of important theoretical paradigms: Pike's (1967) Tagmemics in linguistics and Harris's (1979) Cultural Materialism in anthropology. While I do not fully agree with the theoretical schools of thought developed by either Pike or Harris, both theories have aided me in my own studies, and I recognize and appreciate the work of both of them.

Yet the two theories and the two men are so different that one would hardly expect Pike and Harris to meet, let alone show any interest in each other. Pike is a theist; Harris is a naturalist. Though they both share an emphasis on human behavior, Pike takes an idealist position on culture in his studies,1 while Harris holds to a materialist concept of culture in his. Pike's tagmemics was developed in the 1950s as a way of analyzing human languages; Harris's cultural materialism was developed in the 1960s as a way of understanding and interpreting human culture. The concept that brought them together, of course, was emics and etics.

How could two scientists with such different approaches--theories not even within the same discipline--come to use the same concept (emics and etics) as a major tool in their theories? And what happened when these two men finally met together? That is what this book is about.

Readers of this book will, I think, be delighted to find that Harris and Pike take herein what Richard Bernstein calls a "dialogical approach" as they come together. While hardly in agreement on the topic of this volume--indeed, as the reader will soon see, they hold rival philosophic orientations--these two scholars avoid "the adversarial confrontational style" which would prove unproductive to most of us. In fact, Harris and Pike herein reflect a style of argument that Bernstein (1989:16-17) has recently appealed to:

Conflict and disagreement are unavoidable in our pluralistic situation. . . . What matters is how we respond to conflict. . . . [Rather than an] "adversarial" or "confrontational" style of argumentation, . . . [where] the other is viewed as an opponent, . . . [in a dialogical encounter] one begins with the assumption that the other has something to . . . contribute to our understanding. The initial task is to grasp the other's position in the strongest possible light, . . . in which we can understand our differences. The other is not an adversary or an opponent, but a conversational partner. . . . One does not seek to score a point by exploiting the other's weaknesses; rather, one seeks to strengthen the other's argument as much as possible so as to render it plausible, . . . [a] dialogical encounter where we reasonably explore our differences and conflicts.

In the chapters to follow, we will see that Pike and Harris come surprisingly close to the ideal Bernstein is talking about. It is their style of argumentation which makes this volume worth reading.

Pike was the person who first coined the terms emics and etics, and who first used them in print in 1954 (Pike [1954] 1967 ). Harris first used the terms in print in The Nature of Cultural Things (1964), where he cites Pike. I suppose that the terms were a regular part of my own vocabulary by the early 1960s, but it was not until the '70s that I realized how widespread and popular the terms had become among anthropologists. And it was not until the late '80s that I realized that the terms were being used in other disciplines unrelated to linguistics and anthropology.

By the early '80s, in fact, I was becoming increasingly fascinated with the confusion I found in people's definitions of the terms, and the distinctions that those definitions were supposed to produce. I was sometimes surprised to hear anthropologists and linguists explain the terminology to students in ways with which I disagreed. And since in the middle '70s I was running with the "New Ethnography" paradigm, it took me a long time to accept Harris's use of the concept as a part of cultural materialism.

Part of the confusion is that Pike and Harris not only do not use the concept in the same way, but that they differ in their applications and definitions of the terms. This problem will come out clearly in subsequent chapters of this volume. Various authors have criticized Harris (Howard 1968; Merrifield 1968; Burling 1969:826-827; Goodenough 1970:112-114; Fisher and Werner 1978) or defended him (Berger 1976; Marano 1982; Langness 1987:133-136) for his unique applications of the emic/etic notion, while others have attempted to explain the differences between Pike's and Harris's uses of it (Pelto 1970:67-86; Arnold 1971:22; Durbin 1972:384-385; Kensinger 1975:72-73; Jahoda 1977, 1983; Fisher and Werner 1978; Lett 1987; Feleppa 1986:244-245; 1988), including Harris himself (1976, 1979:34-38). I found only one paper (Ekstrand and Ekstrand 1986) that criticizes Pike for the way he defines the terms. Based on their view of the etymology of the Greek roots from which emic and etic are derived, these authors rather boldly claim that Pike is guilty of "false analogy" and "confusion" because he put his own meanings into the terms, which are the opposite of what they should be (p. 5).

Sometimes we dream. As I recall, it was sometime in 1985 that I began to daydream about how I might possibly get Harris and Pike together where I could listen to them hammer out with each other just what they mean by emics and etics. As it turned out, someone beat me to the punch. To add a little more background here, the reader should know that these two scholars never met or corresponded with each other until 1986. In fact, though Pike was aware of Harris's use of the emic/etic idea in the '60s (Pike 1967:34, 54), he had read next to none of Harris's works until 1986. And although Harris had been using Pike's concept for over 20 years, they had never communicated with each other.

Then, when Pike was lecturing in Spain in September of 1985, Gustavo Bueno, a philosopher at the University of Oviedo mentioned to Pike that when Harris had spoken in Spain earlier that year that he (Harris) had mentioned to Bueno that he would like to meet Pike. The following spring Pike wrote to Harris and invited him to come to the University of Oklahoma to meet with him and present a formal lecture to the faculty and student body of the Summer Institute of Linguistics. Harris accepted, and the two of them, I am told, had two days of very stimulating and cordial discussion together. That was in June of 1986.

I missed it all. I did not even hear about it until weeks later. (My family and I were just moving back to the States from the Philippines that summer.) I did, however, have the privilege of reading their exchange of letters which followed that eventful Oklahoma meeting.

So we can thank Professor Bueno for first getting Harris and Pike together. One must wonder why it took so long.

When I finally met Harris in 1987 at the Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Chicago, I asked him if he would consider participating with Pike at a formal symposium at the 1988 Annual Meeting. To my pleasant surprise, he said yes. Maybe, I thought, I will see Pike and Harris in interaction after all. As soon as I got home from Chicago I wrote a formal proposal to both of them, and they accepted it. The rest is history.

The Diffusion of Emics and Etics in Other Disciplines

Let us review here just how widespread the emic/etic concept has become in academic disciplines other than linguistics and anthropology by the end of the 1980s. Today, of course, the terms are found in common usage in the vocabularies of most anthropologists, and the distinction has proved very useful to them. In fact, most practicing anthropologists today use insights about the differing perceptions of reality of different subcultural groups as a principal--if not the principal--conceptual tool of their trade. The emic/etic distinction, then, underlies one of the basic contributions of modern anthropology to the working world (i.e., the ability to understand and interpret other cultures). Many anthropologists, in fact, if not other social scientists, may owe their jobs to their ability to make the distinction between emic and etic.

In the following discussion I make a few statistical inferences about the emic/etic concept, drawing from a bibliography compiled by Stewart Hussey (1989), which consists of 278 titles of published articles and books that use these terms. His bibliography, compiled in a database format, is annotated and includes several fields, some of which are displayed in summary form in the tables of this chapter.2 The reader must keep in mind that the 278 "records" in the database are not a random sample drawn from some library universe, but from a bibliography of all the references using the two terms that were located through personal library research and library computer search services.

A gradual change came in both the use and meaning of the emic/etic terms by social scientists in the 1970s. As one might expect, there has been a geometric increase in the use of the emic/etic terms since Pike first published on them in the 1954 edition of his major work (1967). (See Table 1.1.) What is more interesting is how the terms diffused into other branches of science during the '70s and at the same time became common words in the English language. This trend is reflected in the gradual inclusion of the terms into unabridged dictionaries (see Table 1.2),3 the spread of the terms into the journals of other disciplines (see Table 1.3), a decrease in the number of authors who felt any need to cite Pike, or anyone else, when they used the terms in print (Table 1.4), and an increase in the number of authors who used the terms in print with no definition or explanation, because they assumed their readers knew and understood the words (Table 1.5).

What is so fascinating is how social scientists use the terms, usually as a heuristic device, for so many widely divergent purposes. The concept was a major tool of the ethnoscientists during their heyday in the early '70s, of cultural materialists today, and of lexicographers for the last quarter century. At least one archaeologist (Arnold 1971) has proposed the concept as a tool for reconstructing cognitive systems of a people from physical contrasts in their artifacts. Anthropologists may be less aware, however, of the many specialists in other fields who use the idea. In fact, various uses of the terms may be found in journals of psychology, psychiatry, sociology, folklore, semiotics, philology, medicine, nursing, public health, education, urban studies, and management. A complete bibliography would list hundreds of publications. The popularity of the concept in psychology is especially salient (Table 1.3), not only obvious in the many psychology articles that use the terms (65 out of the 278 references in Hussey 1989), but also in the several articles which discuss them in the authoritative six-volume Handbook of Cross-Cultural Psychology (Triandis et al. 1980, 1981, 1985).4 The concept had evidently become so common in psychology by the late '70s that one writer in that discipline stated that "currently, the suffixes [of phonetics and phonemics] have nested themselves [so] securely in the jargon of cross-cultural psychology [that they] are hardly ever associated with linguistics by members of the cross-cultural guild" (Lonner 1979:19). Similarly, Alan Dundes (1962) shows how useful the emic/etic model is for analyzing folklore, while Johnson et al. (1981) discusses its usefulness for educational administrators.

It is interesting to note that not only do many of these hundreds of authors neglect to cite Pike or Harris (56% in my sample),5 but that some have cited others as the source of the terms (see, e.g., Hall 1964:155, Richards 1972:97, Adams-Price and Reese 1986, and Olmedo 1981:1081). Smith and Sluckin (1979) in citing another source do credit Harris as the early source. A number of psychology publications--16 in Hussey's (1989) sample bibliography--cite psychologist John Berry's (1969) now-classic paper, and not Pike, in their discussions of emics and etics, thus leading their readers to assume Berry is the source, even though Berry states that "Pike . . . coined the terms" (p. 123). Webster's dictionary supplements (1976, 1983) attribute the origin of the terms to John Algeo.6 Of course, a number of publications--7% in my sample (19/262, see Table 1.4, column 3)--use the terms citing Harris, and not Pike, implying at least to their readers that Harris is the source. For example, in a 1976 article in Current Anthropology (Berger 1976), the author and five of eight commentators use the terms many times, citing Harris's publications frequently, but Pike not at all.

Further, the terms are defined in the literature in many different and--in my view--usually inadequate ways. (See, e.g., the various definitions in the dictionaries cited in Table 1.2.) Some authors equate emic and etic with verbal versus nonverbal, or as specific versus universal, or as interview versus observation, or as subjective knowledge versus scientific knowledge, or as good versus bad, or as ideal behavior versus actual behavior, or as description versus theory, or as private versus public, or as ethnographic (i.e., idiosyncratically uncomparable) versus ethnological (comparable cross-culturally). One linguistic dictionary (Ducrot and Todorov 1979:36) says emic interprets events according to their particular cultural function, while etic characterizes events only by spatio-temporal criteria. An epidemiological study on obesity (Massara 1980) differentiates the emic/etic terms as "informal" versus "formal" research procedures. An article in a medical journal (Weidman 1979) uses the terms 16 times, always in italics, defining them only as "cultural/within" versus "orthodox/without"; the lengthy bibliography in this article cites neither Pike nor Harris. In an education journal, a professor of English (Nattinger 1978) differentiates emics and etics as "soft facts" versus "hard facts." And one anthropologist (Monagan 1985:353) explains the difference as "the ethnographic situation" in contrast to "a grid from the data itself." Another anthropologist (Sindzingre 1988:447) refers to a "version of the emic/etic distinction" as dichotomizing between a writer who agrees with a theoretical perspective (emic) versus one who disagrees with the perspective ("an outside observer," hence etic). Levi-Strauss (1972:20-23) uses the terms, but argues that the meanings of the two words should be reversed: emic should be etic, and etic should be emic!

An example of some of the surprising meanings people give to the terms was brought home to me one day last year when I was driving along with a group of graduate students. One of them pointed out to the rest of us an interesting object in a nearby field. Later when the driver asked us what we had been viewing and talking about, a student said to him, "Oh, you were driving emically, huh?"--meaning he had only been noticing the significant items needed to be observed through his windshield to get us safely to our destination. These students, most of whom were then in my anthropology class, seemed to have no trouble understanding the speaker's adverbial use of the term. But I did not agree with that semantic use; and I suspect Pike never originally intended it to be used that way.

Hymes (1970:281-282) discusses in an early work why the most commonly applied meaning of emic ("native [or insider's] point of view") is inadequate and misleading, namely, that natives normally are neither conscious of their emic system nor able to formulate it for the investigator. (Harris reviews other interpretations in chapter 3 of this volume.)

Common dictionaries do not help us much, either, in our search for the meanings of the terms. The just-published New Lexicon Webster's Dictionary (Webster's 1989) does little for its readers when it defines emic with nothing more than "adj. (linguistics) have structurally significant characteristics," especially since it neglected to define etic at all! The 1989 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary (Simpson and Weiner 1989), the most comprehensive English dictionary ever published, gives inadequate glosses for the terms and attempts to illustrate the meanings with an example quoted verbatim from a 1969 article in the journal English Studies. It says:

One person will shake hands with you by lifting your hand up to about shoulder height and then drop it, another will move your hand less high and then down again, a third will "pump' it up and down two or three times; in Western culture these may be called etic differences and can be viewed as various realizations of the one emic element: "shaking hands' (p. 427; quoted from Siertsema 1969:586).

Admittedly, it would be difficult to write a short dictionary gloss of the terms, but the preceding two examples only complicate the already present confusion among students and scientists as to their meaning. A more satisfactory definition of the words is found in the 1987 Random House Dictionary:

[Emic:] adj. Ling. pertaining to or being a significant unit that functions in contrast with other units in a language or other system of behavior....coined by U.S. linguist Kenneth L. Pike....[Etic:] pertaining to or being the raw data of a language or other area of behavior, without considering the data as significant units functioning within a system (Random House 1987:637, 666).

Perhaps most of these scores of definitions are not incorrect. After all, as we scan through many of these publications, we are forced to recognize how useful the distinction has proven to be for different authors in so many different disciplines, as they try to communicate to their readers.

It is obvious, for example, how heuristically helpful even the simplest and most common definition of the concept ("insider" versus "outsider" view) has become to doctors and psychologists attempting to diagnose illnesses of patients of another culture, or to educators teaching in a cross-cultural setting. What is the norm in the culture of the teacher or examining nurse may have no application in the culture of the patient or pupil. The resulting miscommunication may be especially glaring when the world view of the latter differs from that of the former. In psychology, one author in that field says his colleagues have only recently (in 1979) "become increasingly aware of the desperate need for an emic approach" (Ciborowski 1979:107). Clearly, the emic/etic idea has done much to help psychologists recognize that "much of what we label as cross-cultural psychology [is] essentially centri-cultural psychology" (ibid.).

So perhaps we should not fault writers too quickly who use the terms differently from their original meaning. Though many writers are using metaphorical extensions which go beyond (or restrict) the original meanings of the terms, they, and their readers, find the metaphors useful. In any case, what is certain--and intriguing--is that there are many meanings today for emics and etics.

In current anthropological publications the terms are especially common, and usually appear unitalicized, with no reference to their origin, and often undefined. I was thus surprised to hear Roger Keesing say, in his discussant's comment at the November '88 symposium where most of the present chapters were first presented, that "none of the cognitive anthropologists whose work I have been reading in the last ten years use those terms any more. . . . [The concept] lives on [only] in the periphery. . . . I just don't think emic and etic is a relevant distinction any more." I must disagree with Keesing's view here. Certainly the terms may be found in most current issues of the major anthropology journals (as, e.g., in the latest issues I have received as I write this--in January 1990--of American Anthropologist [December 1989, p. 1089] and of Current Anthropology [February 1990, p. 49]). The terms are also found, of course, as Keesing recognized in his comment, in 50% of the elementary anthropology textbooks for undergraduate students published since 1976 (N=28), here always with some kind of definition. Most of those texts, 72%, cite neither Pike, Harris, nor anyone else in their discussion of the concept, while 28% cite Pike.7 In Hussey's (1989) bibliography, 29% of the publications using the terms fail to cite any source at all (see Table 1.4, column 6).

Perhaps, then, this state of affairs means that by the end of the 1980s the terms have become so much a part of other academic fields, especially within the social sciences, that they now belong to all of us and no longer just to Pike and Harris. I view this as good for the discipline. So do Pike and Harris, I am sure. And as we see from their discussions in the following chapters, both of them are interested in finding out how we can build on the past--not defend it.

One problem remains before us, however. Although we probably should allow freedom in others' definitions and uses of the emic/etic distinction, I feel that the anthropological profession will be hurt if we just sit by and let some of the expressed meanings pass--for example, such extremes as "emic equals sloppy" and "etic equals precise," and other definitions which show a fundamental misunderstanding of the notion. As two anthropologists have pointed out, "Unfortunately, emic and etic have become slogans or catchwords in anthropology, rather than clear-cut concepts" (Crane and Angrosino 1984:125). This hurts our discipline, and we must struggle against such careless uses of what has proved to be one of the most important ideas in social science today.

With that, we turn in the following chapters to the question: Just what is the history, significance, and application of emics and etics today, and where do we go from here?

Table 1.1.Publication Dates of 278 References Using Emic/Etic

dates

no. of references

no. authored by Pike

no. authored by Harris

1954-60

1

1

0

1961-65

9

0

1

1966-70

20

1

2

1971-75

44

0

2

1976-80

83

0

2

1981-85

76

3

1

1986-89

45*

1

2

totals

278

6

10

*The small number of references shown for the years 1986-89 is skewed
because many recent publications have not yet been archived into computerized
library computer search services.

Table 1.2.Dictionaries That List Emic and Etic

dictionary

reference

year

Cites Pike

Cites Harris

Supplement Oxford English Dictionary

Burchfield

1972

yes

no

Dictionary of Language and Linguistics

Hartmann & Stork

1972

no

no

Gendai Eigogaku jiten

Kotaro et al.

1973

yes

no

Encyclopedia of Anthropology

Hunter & Whitten

1976

yes

no

6000 Words: Supplement Webster's 3rd

Webster's

1976

no

no

Ying Hang Yuyanxue Cihui

Liu and Zhao

1979

no*

no

Encyclopedic Dict Sciences of Lang

Ducrot & Todorov

1979

yes

no

First Dict of Ling & Phonetics

Crystal

1980

yes

no

9000 Words: Supplement Webster's 3rd

Webster's

1983

no

no

Standard Dict of Social Sciences

Koschnick

1984

yes

no

Dictionary of Ling & Phonetics

Crystal

1985

yes

no

Random House Dictionary

Random House

1987

yes

no

Oxford English Dictionary 2nd

Simpson & Weiner

1989

yes

no

New Lexicon Webster’s**

Webster's

1989

no

no

*The Liu and Zhao (1979) dictionary does not
cite Pike under "emic" or "etic," but does cite him
under their definition for "tagmemics."

**This dictionary (Webster's 1989) includes the word "emic,"
but not "etic."

Table 1.3.Breakdown of Categories
in the 278 References in the Sample Bibliography

categories

no. of references

anthropology

74

psychology

65

linguistics

22

cross-cultural research

18

ethnography

17

sociology

14

medicine

13

dictionaries

12

education

12

psychiatry

7

translation

4

management

3

archaeology

2

folklore

2

economics

2

religion

1

English

1

(other)

9

total

278

Table 1.4.Publications Which Cite Pike, Harris, Others, or No One*
(in their discussions of emics/etics)

1

2

3

4

5

6

dates

no. of references

% that cite Pike

% that cite Harris

% that cite P&H

% that cite others

% that cite no one

1961-65

8

88% (7)

0% (0)

0% (0)

0% (0)

13% (1)

1966-70

17

41% (7)

12% (2)

18% (3)

18% (3)

12% (2)

1971-75

42

33% (14)

2% (1)

14% (6)

24% (10)

26% (11)

1976-80

81

20% (16)

9% (7)

7% (6)

32% (26)

32% (26)

1981-85

72

21% (15)

10% (7)

7% (5)

31% (22)

32% (23)

1986-89

42**

26% (11)

5% (2)

14% (6)

21% (9)

33% (14)

totals

262

27% (70)

7% (19)

10% (26)

27% (70)

29% (77)

*N=262 (In this table the 6 publications by Pike
and the 10 by Harris are excluded from the sample of 278.)

**The small number of references shown for the years 1986-89 is skewed because
many recent publications have not yet been archived into computerized library
search services.

Table 1.5.Percentage of References in Bibliography
That Define the Terms Emic and Etic*

decade

define

don't define

totals

1961-70

72% (18/25)

28% (7/25)

100% (25/25)

1971-80

63% (77/123)

37% (46/123)

100% (123/123)

1981-89

60% (68/114)

40% (46/114)

100% (114/114)

totals

62% (163/262)

38% (99/262)

100% (262/262)

*N=262 (In this table the 6 publications by Pike
and the 10 by Harris are excluded from the sample of 278.)

Endnotes

Not that Pike is an idealist in the philosophical sense, but rather in the
anthropological sense. That is, as Pelto states it, "Pike supports an
"idealist' explanation of human behavior. That is, causes of human action
are to be found mainly in the definitions, beliefs, values, and ideologies of
the actors" (1970:82-83). Harris, on the other hand, "seeks
explanations of human action in the environmental, the constraints of the
"real world' surrounding human actors" (ibid.:83).

The reader who wishes to have a copy of Hussey's (1989) bibliography may order
it on three-and-a-half or five-and-a-quarter-inch IBM-compatible diskette.
(See address for ordering in the References Cited). The bibliography is in a
database format which may be read by any standard database file. A "README"
file on the diskette explains the structure of Hussey's database, including
the field names and sizes.

To my knowledge, the earliest English dictionary to include the terms emics
and etics is the 1972 Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary (Burchfield
1972).

The seven articles I noted in the H.C.C.P. are those by Brislin, by Lonner,
and by Triandis in vol. 1, by Berry, and by Naroll, Michik and Naroll
in vol. 2, and by Altman and Chemers, and by Davidson and Thomson in
vol. 5.

This figure is the quotient of the sum of the totals of columns 5 and 6 of
Table 1.4, divided by the sample (i.e., 70+77/262=.56).

Neither of these dictionary supplements indicate why they printed Algeo's
name in their definitions of the terms, nor do they cite any publication
by him. Algeo assumes (personal correspondence) that the supplement editors
picked up their citation for the terms from one of the two published versions
of an essay he wrote on tagmemics (Algeo 1970, 1974). Algeo, by the way, states
clearly in those two papers that "Pike was the coiner of the terms"
(1974:3).

This sample of 28 textbooks came from my own library shelf. Only one of them
appears in Hussey's (1989) bibliography. Harris himself does not cite Pike
in the later editions of his anthropology texts (1985, 1987), even though he
discusses the terms in several places in those books. He does, however, cite Pike
in the earlier editions, and in many of his theoretical publications on emics and
etics.

References Cited

Adams-Price, Carolyn E., and Hayne W. Reese

1986 An "Emic' Study of Children's Memory in the Nursery School.
Paper presented at the Conference on Human Development, Nashville. April 3-5.

Algeo, John

1970 Tagmemics: A Brief Overview. Journal of English Linguistics 4:1-6.

1989 Pragmatism, Pluralism and the Healing of Wounds. Presidential address delivered before the Eighty-fourth Annual Eastern Division Meeting of the American Philosophical Association in Washington, DC, December 29, 1988. Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 63(3, November):5-18.

Berry, John W.

1969 On Cross-Cultural Comparability. International Journal of Psychology 4:119-128.

Burchfield, R.W. (ed.)

1972 A Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary. Vol. I, A-G. Oxford: Clarendon.

1964 Adumbration as a Feature of Intercultural Communication. In The Ethnography of Communication. John J. Gumperz and Dell Hymes, eds. Pp. 154-163. American Anthropologist (special publication) 66(6), Part 2.

Harris, Marvin

1964. The Nature of Cultural Things. New York: Random House.

1968 The Rise of Anthropological Theory. New York: Harper & Row.

1976 History and Significance of the Emic/Etic Distinction. Annual Review of Anthropology 5:329-350.

1979 Cultural Materialism: The Struggle for a Science of Culture. New York: Vintage.